Prior to 2000, I thought that an electoral college/popular vote inversion would result in voters being shocked about an institution they paid little attention to and that would lead to serious calls to change it. But, of course, that proved to be incorrect. The bottom line is that a) we have an unhealthy reverence for anything that we can attribute to the Founding Fathers, b) those same Fathers made changing the system almost impossible, and c) the winners of any system have no incentive to change that system. (...)

As much as I think that the EC should be replaced with a popular vote
system, I cannot see a pathway that leads to its demise save a situation
in which the Republicans also fear winning the popular vote and losing
the EC as well. The thing is: the electoral advantage in terms of
actual voters belongs to Democrats: consider that from 1992 to the
present (almost a quarter century), the Republicans have only won the
most popular votes once, and that was in 2004. They lost in 1992, 1996,
2000, 2008, 2012, and in 2016. And yet, in that same time-span, they
have won the presidency twice. Why? Because of the electoral college.
They do not have any incentive to get rid of it.

“What is a ‘weekend?’” Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, famously asked during the first season of Downton Abbey, set in 1912. The joke, of course, is that the Dowager Countess is too aristocratic to even recognize the concept of a week divided between work and leisure. Consistent with this portrayal, Thorstein Veblen, one of the biggest theorists on status signaling, suggested in 1899 that living a leisurely life and not working (what he refers to as “conspicuous abstention from labor”) is the most powerful way to signal one’s status in the eyes of others. This makes sense: if you are very wealthy, you can afford as much leisure as you wish.

Fast-forward to the 21st century and hop across the Atlantic. In today’s America, complaining about being busy and working all the time is so commonplace most of us do it without thinking. If someone asks “How are you?” we no longer say “Fine” or “I’m well, thank you.” We often simply reply “Busy!” (...)

Busyness and lack of leisure are also being more celebrated in the media. Advertising, often a barometer of social norms, used to feature wealthy people relaxing by the pool or on a yacht (e.g., Cadillac’s “The Only Way to Travel” campaign in the 90’s). Today, those ads are being replaced with ads featuring busy individuals who work long hours and have very limited leisure time. For example, recall Cadillac’s 2014 Super Bowl commercialfeaturing a busy and leisure-deprived businessman lampooning those who enjoy long vacations.

Intrigued by this phenomenon, we decided to conduct a series of studies to examine how signaling busyness at work influences perceptions of status in the eyes of others. (...)

A nice post at the HBR blog by Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia and Anat Keinan describes how being busy is now celebrated as a symbol of high status.

This is not natural. Marshall Sahlins has shown that in hunter-gather societies (which were the human condition for nine-tenths of our existence) people typically worked for only around 20 hours a week (pdf). In pre-industrial societies, work was task-oriented; people did as much as necessary and then stopped. (...)

My guess would be that Sanders’s ideological extremism could’ve cost the Democrats a percentage or two of the vote. So, yes, a priori, before the campaign, I’d say that Hillary Clinton was the stronger general election candidate. And I agree with Drum that, just as lots of mud was thrown at Clinton, the Russians would’ve been able to find some dirt on Sanders too.

But here’s the thing. Hillary Clinton won the election by 3 million votes. Her votes were just not in the right places. Sanders could’ve won a million or two votes less than Clinton, and still won the election. Remember, John Kerrylost to George W. Bush by 3 million votes but still almost won in the Electoral College—he was short just 120,000 votes in Ohio.

So, even if Sanders was a weaker general election candidate than Clinton, he still could’ve won in this particular year.

Or, to put it another way, Donald Trump lost the presidential vote by 3 million votes but managed to win the election because of the vote distribution. A more mainstream Republican candidate could well have received more votes—even a plurality!—without winning the electoral college.

The 2016 election was just weird, and it’s reasonable to say that (a) Sanders would’ve been a weaker candidate than Clinton, but (b) in the event, he could’ve won.

In all the damage assessments and recriminations following the presidential election, one theme I’ve seen way too much of is blaming Trump’s victory on “political correctness.” One person blamed the Left for “demonizing white men” for the past eight years instead of focusing on economic and class issues. Another clutched his pearls about what a dumb strategic move it was to dismiss most of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.” And at Reason, human dumpster fire Robby Soave — whose shtik seems to be retyping old Reed Irvine and Dinesh D’Souza screeds with his name on them — literally lays the blame for Trump at the feet of campus speech codes, trigger warnings and safe spaces. (No, if anything defeated Clinton it was stay-at-home Democratic voters disgusted by a Democratic Party that embraced way too many of the same neoliberal — not genuinely libertarian — economic policies favored by Reason.)

(...)

But the cultural Right’s sense of grievance is utter nonsense. For people who complain so much about the “politics of victimhood,” they play the victim card better than anybody else.
Long ago, as a child, I can remember hearing old folks complain that “this country’s been going to pot ever since all these people started screaming about their ‘rights.'” And that’s still the attitude of those who talk about “taking our country back.”

Whatever they think of marginalized people demanding their rights, they sure aren’t modest about the rights they claim for themselves. They think they have the right to decide what languages people speak, what religious garb they wear, who they marry, and what bathrooms they go to. And when they talk about PC as an assault on their freedom, what they’re referring to is their freedom to prohibit other people from doing things they disapprove of. You can’t even say “Happy Holidays” to them without them whining about a “War on Christmas.” For all their mockery of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” they’re the most emotionally fragile and easily offended people in existence. (...)

On top of all this, treating the concerns of marginalized people as secondary for the sake of anti-fascist unity is really stupid from a purely strategic point of view. The fight for basic human rights for justice by people of color, women, LGBT people and immigrants isn’t a ruling class strategy to divide the producing classes. Rosa Parks didn’t refuse to give up her seat, the people at Stonewall didn’t decide to stand up and fight, because they’d been paid by elites to do so. But racism, sexism and homophobia themselves really are ruling class weapons to divide us against each other. It isn’t marginalized people fighting for their dignity, their very existence, who are being “divisive” and playing into the hands of the capitalist ruling class. The divisive ones, the dupes of the ruling class, are the people who would vote for a fascist just out of spite for having to coexist with people they disapprove of. (...)

Abandoning marginalized people is also strategically stupid because it was marginalized people themselves, alienated by Clinton’s neoliberalism, who were some of the most likely voters to stay home and vote third party. A lot of ardent Clinton supporters liked to frame the left-wing opposition to HRC as “privileged white males.” But the people doing this framing were themselves disproportionately the upper-middle-class white professional types who are the demographic core of establishment liberalism. To the extent that they adhered to any kind of racial or gender politics, it was the outmoded 1970s model of one-dimensional “identity politics” that focused exclusively on putting women and People of Color into the existing power structures, and ignoring class issues, rather than dismantling the power structures themselves.

Amidst the recriminations and collective shock in the face of Trump’s victory (and the myriad other reverses suffered by progressives in 2016), a consensus is emerging: the weakness of the left is attributable to its embrace of “identity politics”. Rather than focussing on the interests and priorities of the majority, the story goes, the left has for too long embraced a simplistic and sectional politics in which the interests of racial and sexual minorities have taken centre stage, at the expense popularity and electability. (...)

But what, precisely, is this “identity politics” that inspires such animosity? At a basic level, “identity politics” refers to any politics that seeks to represent and/or advance the claims of a particular social group. But in the narratives outlined above, it has a more specific meaning: in left circles, “identity politics” is, as Nancy Fraser pointed out back in 1998, used largely as a derogatory term for feminism, anti-racism and anti-heterosexism. The implication was – and very often still is – that gender, race and sexuality are identity-based in the sense that they are seen as flimsy, superficial and, to use Judith Butler’s memorable phrase, ‘merely cultural’. This, of course, is to be contrasted with its constitutive outside, class. Class relations, in the eyes of the identity politics critic, exhibit a depth, profundity and materiality that ‘mere identity’ lacks. Furthermore, the alleged universalism of class is contrasted with the narrow, sectional concerns characteristic of so-called identity politics.

But what, precisely, is wrong with this framing of the problem? For one, the implied distinction between “identity” (read: narrow, shallow, self-interested) and “class” politics (read: broad, deep, universal, authentic) misconstrues the character of these different strands of progressive politics, in at least three ways. First, all forms of politics arguably involve some kind of appeal to an identity, insofar as, to use the language of political theorist Michael Saward, they entail claims to speak for a politically salient constituency (and thus an “identity” of sorts). This applies as much to “class” as any other dimension of power and identity. Indeed, as Gurminder Bhambra has argued in a recent piece for The Sociological Review, these appeals to “class” are quintessential identity politics: they appeal to an identity category – the (presumed white) working class – whose interests have been shamefully neglected by elitist, out of touch leftists and liberals. The question is not, therefore, universalism or identitarianism, but whether or not we acknowledge the “identitarian” character of our political claims. Something akin to this is eloquently described by James Clifford in a 1999 essay entitled ‘Taking Identity Politics Seriously’, where he argues that ‘opposition to the special claims of racial or ethnic minorities often masks another, unmarked ‘identity politics’, an actively sustained historical positioning and possessive investment in Whiteness’. (...)

hird, a frankly bewildering inference made by Kinnock, Žižek et al is that the left in its various guises has spent its time of late doggedly pursuing the interests of women, sexual minorities and racial minorities. The reality, however, is that left-wing movements and political parties in the UK and US have an at best patchy track records on race, gender and sexuality, as recent scholarship by the likes of Janet Conway, Julia Downes, Lara Coleman and Abigail Bakan make clear. All the way from the moderate liberal left to the radical Marxist left, race, gender and sexuality continue to be cast as minority concerns at best, and “bourgeois distractions” at worst, while sexism and misogyny (including, but not limited to, the sexual abuse of women comrades) remain depressingly prevalent across a variety of left spaces. (...)

Let us, therefore, not be under any illusions about how these dismissals of “identity politics” function: they are, in effect, a kind of dog whistle to those on the left who might, for instance, agree that black lives matter, but ultimately believe that when push comes to shove it is the (white male) working class that matters more. As others have pointed out, this is tantamount to being called upon to sacrifice a range of constituencies – women, racial minorities, queers, immigrants (and at times perhaps also trans people, non-binary and gender non-conforming folk, sex workers) – on the altar of political expediency. Putting aside any doubts as to whether this would actually work in terms of galvanising electoral support, this is clearly a morally bankrupt form of politics.

Nearly a decade after the beginning of the Great Recession, the economic recovery has been concentrated in a few sectors and a few places, mostly fields in technology and in coastal cities. Many Americans have been left behind in jobs with stagnating wages, while rising housing costs prevent them from moving. To stabilize their communities and rebuild the household wealth lost in the financial crisis, many Americans—particularly those in once decaying inner city neighborhoods—are turning to the model of co-operative businesses, which emphasize joint ownership by workers and democratic management.

The dry statistics on trade aren’t working to counter Trump. They make for good policy at one level and terrible policy (and politics) at another. The aggregate gains are irrelevant to someone suffering a personal loss. Critics need to find an effective response to Trump. I don’t think we have it yet. And here is the hardest part: My sense is that Democrats will respond by offering a bigger safety net. But people don’t want a welfare check. They want a job. And this is what Trump, wrongly or rightly, offers.

Some 46 percent of General Motors’ hourly workers are
below age 35. They have never known a depression, they have had more
schooling than the man who lived through the last one, and they aren’t
impressed by the old Spartan idea that hard, repetitive work is a
virtue. They are less responsive to authority than even the men who
seized the flint GM plants in the historic 1936-1937 sit-down strikes.

That is precisely the background against which discontent
is surfacing throughout the industry today, discontent that has reached
its most advanced stage in the auto industry.

The formation of the CIO in the 1930s settled once and for all the
idea that owners or managers or stockholders had the right to run their
plants any way they saw fit. (...)

When Ford fell to the union in 1941, both the check-off and full time
for union committeemen were incorporated into the contract. But the
apparent victories only created more problems. Workers wanted full time
for union representatives to get them out from under company pressures
and discrimination. Getting elected steward often got you the worst job
in a department and stuck away in a corner where you couldn’t see what
was happening.

But full time for stewards did more than relieve union
representatives from company pressure-it ended up by relieving
representatives from workers’ pressure. The steward is less available
than he was before, and you have to have your foreman go looking for him
should you happen to need him .

The check-off produced a similar situation. Designed to keep the
company from pressuring weaker workers to stay out of the union even
though they were sharing in its benefits, the check-off ended up
reducing worker pressure on the union officials.

No longer does the steward have to listen to workers’ complaints each
month as he goes round collecting the dues. Once a month the dues are
delivered in one huge check from the company to the union and the worker
never sees his dues payment. (...)

And with the Reuther administration the union moved to participate
directly in the management and discipline of workers in production.
All through the fifties, with intensive automation and decentralization
going on in the auto industry, the union collaborated in crushing the
numerous wildcat strikes, in getting rid of the most militant workers,
in establishing labor peace in the industry. (...)

The situation has not improved since then. GM complains that the
number of grievances in its plants has grown from 106,000 in 1960 to
256,000 in 1699 or 60 for each 100 workers.

What are these specific local grievances? They involve production
standards: the speed of a line, the rate on a machine, the number of
workers assigned to a given job, the allowable variations in jobs on a
given line. They involve health and safety standards : unsafe machines,
cluttered or oily floors, rates of production which prevent the taking
of reasonable precautions, the absence or misuse of hoists or cranes,
protection from flames or furnaces, protection from sharp, unfinished
metal, protection from welding or other dangerous chemicals or flames,
the right to shut an unsafe job down until the condition is changed.

They involve the quality of life in the plant: the authoritarian
company rules which treat workers like a combination of prison inmate
and kindergarten child, the right to move about the plant, the right to
relieve yourself physically without having to get the foreman’s
permission or the presence of a relief man, the right to reasonable
breaks in the work, the right to a reasonable level of heat in the
winter or reasonable ventilation in the summer. And on and on.

The grievances that crowd the dockets of General Motors and of other
companies cover the total range of life in the factory. The fact that
they are called grievances helps to conceal what they really are-a
reflection of the total dissatisfaction of the workers in the way
production is run and of the des ire of the workers to impose their own
will in the factory.

The UAW and the Ford Motor Company recently have been discussing the
problem of boredom on the assembly line. The only reason they are
discussing it at all-it is by no means a new development-is because more
and more workers are refusing to accept factory discipline as a law of
nature.

And it is not boredom but power which is at stake.

The same worker who for eight hours a day attaches belts to a motor
and can’t wait to get out of the plant will spend his weekends tinkering
with his car and consider it rewarding work. The difference is in who
controls the work.

It might be worth noting a couple of things. All workers are
exploited to one degree or another. But office workers on the whole do
not have to walk past armed guards going to and from work and have a
certain amount of freedom in scheduling their work on the job. The
coffee break is not a blue-collar institution. (...)

The reorganization, technological change and decentralization that
characterized the fifties and culminated in the depression gave way to a
new expansion which brought significant numbers of young workers into
the industry in the U.S. These are workers who couldn’t care less about
what the union won in 1937. They are not more backward (as the union
bureaucrats like to pretend) but more advanced. They are attuned to the
need to change the nature of work, to the need of human beings to find
satisfaction in what they do. It is this new and changing working class
that was the basis for the new level of wildcat strikes, for a doubled
rate of absenteeism, for an increased amount of violence in plants. It
is a new working class that no conceivable contract settlement can
control or immobilize. (...)

The complaints against the young workers who make up a crucial force
in the factories indicate that the wildcats of the past may be replaced,
or at least supplemented, by something new.

The tightly knit structures of the big industrial unions leave no
room for maneuvering. There is no reasonable way in which young workers
can use the union constitution to overturn and overhaul the union
structure. The constitution is against them; the money and jobs
available to union bureaucrats are against them. And if these fail, the
forces of law and order of city, state and federal governments are
against them. (...)

The impossibility of transforming the unions has been argued by a number
of observers. Clark Kerr has noted, without disapproval, that “unions
and corporations alike are, with very few exceptions, one-party
governments.” That is the phrase usually reserved for Stalinist or
fascist totalitarian governments. But it is not overdrawn. (...)

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” (...) For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont.

The terminology here can be confusing. When progressives talk about the working class, typically they mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 in 2008. That is the true “middle class,” and they call themselves either “middle class” or “working class.”

Monday, November 21, 2016

Trump’s promised “law and order” presidency would mean a Christmas list of presents for the police. Exploding budgets and the removal of any pretense of constraining oversight from the Justice Department. Every beat cop in the nation flush with the invigorating knowledge that the President of the United States has their back, with money, legal support, public support, and ultimately the Presidential Pardon. The full extent of what is possible is dark indeed, but even moderate predictions are dire. We cannot afford to plan for the best.

In 71 days Trump will begin turning the ICE into a military operation capable of the industrial-scale ethnic cleansing he promised repeatedly. He will certainly shirk on some promises, but even if his effectiveness at getting all the millions he targets falls short, he will not miss the opportunity to demonstrate power, even if that means something as obscene as the national guard standing openly in sanctuary cities.

In 71 days Trump will approach an FBI already coursing with his fervent supporters and tell them to go ahead and do whatever it takes to get the domestic terrorists that didn’t vote for him. All the bored and overstaffed Joint Terrorism Taskforce offices the Bush administration left behind surveilling vegan potlucks will finally get to just bring the damn hippies in for questioning. The same pattern we’ve seen in countless countries when right-wing populists get into office will play out. Police raiding punk houses and roughing up anarchists for the sheer pleasure of it, finally able to assert their authority over those whose mere existence offends them. And this is the presidency when US police will be given drones with weapons.

In 71 days Trump will immediately turn his vindictive eye upon the media and every journalist he can get his fingers on. The press corp will be gutted and reporters will be threatened. The same tired procedure we’ve seen in dozens of other countries will arrive here overnight. The sort of regime where armed raids are used to conduct tax audits and incidentally bust up equipment. Trump’s number one concern with the Supreme Court justices he’ll stock it with will be — as always — their loyalty to him and their openness to allowing him to sue everyone for libel.

In 71 days Trump will inherit a vast surveillance apparatus of unparalleled scope in the world that will immediately be turned to his benefit against domestic adversaries or dissidents. He will empower those who have been stewing in outrage at their (meager) constraint. The US’ torture program will escalate. Just because he can. Just for the kick of it. American citizens will end up in Guantanamo and black sites around the world, what barriers to this have previously stood will make no sense to Trump. It will not take long, all things considered, before such American torture subjects are not just Muslim.

In 71 days Trump will start asking what can be done about that whole unruly internet thing and all those losers spreading lies. A president already aligned with Russia and with less than zero compulsion to lecture about human rights or leverage the activists within other superpowers will inexorably build a unprecedented global collaboration against Tor and internet freedom. A unified coalition that most of our existing tools were not prepared for.

We will face an America probably more reactionary and authoritarian than Italy under Berlusconi but probably less authoritarian than Germany under Hitler. The proper analogues are probably modern Hungary and Romania. Authoritarian populist “law and order” regimes with some pretense of normal modern life, riven with empowered racists and neighborhood curbstompings. A broadly mobilized reactionary populace and a shattered and demoralized opposition.

I heavily doubt Steve Bannon is the anti-Semite many on the left now claim he is. It's mostly based on one thing that his wife said that he said, about not wanting to send his kids to school with whiny Jewish girls. It's hearsay, about one thing he said in private years ago, which isn't even that anti-Semitic. (...)

I also hear a lot of claims that Bannon is a white nationalist. Some are based on stuff he allowed to be published at Breitbart (e.g., this), but many seem to rely on one thing he saidwhile interviewing Donald Trump, in which he worried that too many immigrant CEOs would reduce "civic society." That's not something I agree with, since I'm strongly and categorically in favor of skilled immigration. But it certainly by itself doesn't peg him as a white nationalist, especially when he vigorously and publicly and explicitly denies being a white nationalist. So if you think he's B.S.-ing about that, your case will have to rely on Breitbart articles.

So what does Bannon believe in? The main articulation of his worldview that I know of comes from this 2014 speech. Essentially, Bannon's worldview seems to have three main pillars:

1. The fruits of capitalism should be more broadly distributed.
2. The West is in a war with radical Islam and must prevail.
3. Secularism contributes to the weakness of the West.

(...)

This "center-right populism" is basically a cross between FDR, Bernie Sanders, and Ross Douthat. Bannon also criticizes "crony capitalism", and says that he thinks a Judeo-Christian ethic facilitates a more equitable form of capitalism.

Bannon criticizes secularism, which is pretty standard among religious conservatives, and also remind me of Ross Douthat. In fact, Bannon's ideas sound a lot like the "reform conservatism" that had been making the intellectual rounds before Trump showed up on the scene.

But the one place where Bannon comes out very strongly against an external enemy is when he talks about radical Islam (...)

Bannon's view is that radical Islam is attacking the West, and must be defeated by a united Judeo-Christian West. (...)

Bannon's call for a "church militant" and a "church of the West" is basically similar to the Holy Leagues that fought the Ottomans in the 1500s. It's not a call to invasion, like the original Crusades, but rather a defensive move. Bannon is calling on the Catholic Church in particular, but also Christianity, Western capitalism, and all other unifying institutions of the West, to act as unifying and motivating forces to fight this struggle. (...)

But I believe that Bannon fundamentally misunderstands what's going on with radical Islam. Some of the malign energy of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other radical Islamic groups has been directed against the West and against Christians, yes. But most of it has been directed at other Muslims in Muslim countries. Only a very small part of what we're witnessing is a continuation of the eternal clash between Europe and the Middle East. Most of it is an internal civil war within the Islamic Umma.

More than a decade ago, Sessions was pushing for a fortified barrier on our Southern border, and has never let go of the dream. He has also opposed every congressional attempt at immigration reform since then, of which Reason's Shikha Dalmia wrote, "Sessions has done more than any human alive to torpedo every sensible immigration reform effort and makes no bones about his wish to basically stop all immigration. He moves the goalposts on reform constantly, recently even calling for the elimination of the H-1B visa program for foreign techies, which sent chills down the IT sector's spine."

It's not just illegal immigration Sessions opposes, he's also fond of spreading the canard that all immigrants are a drain on the economy and take the jobs which are the birthright of all native-born Americas, when in fact, the opposite is much closer to the truth. (...)

After previously mischaracterizing certain countries' efforts at drug decriminalization as "legalization" and incorrectly arguing that they have "failed," Sessions lamented that Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign against drugs has been relegated to history and replaced by a growing tolerance for the legalization of adult recreational use of marijuana. (...)

In an appearance on Morning Joe in 2009, Sessions sympathized with those who "might feel uneasy" about the prospect of a gay Supreme Court justice, which he described as "big concern."

Sessions had been nominated by President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship in 1986, but his nomination was torpedoed after multiple allegations that he used racially insensitive language to colleagues were leveled against him.

A former US Attorney (Thomas Figures) and another Justice Department employee (Gerald Hebert) both testified that Sessions had described the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as "un-American" and "communist-inspired." For his part, Sessions himself said during his confirmation hearings that these groups could rightfully be called "un-American" when they "they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions," particularly when addressing foreign policy issues.

Hebert also testified that Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people," and Figures (who is black)claimed Sessions had called him "boy" and had said that he used to like the Ku Klux Klan until he found out some of its members smoke marijuana. Sessions claimed he was merely joking about the KKK.

Bonus fact: Sessions voted in favor of a ban on "flag desecration" to be added to the Constitution.

In all the damage assessments and recriminations following the presidential election, one theme I’ve seen way too much of is blaming Trump’s victory on “political correctness.” One person blamed the Left for “demonizing white men” for the past eight years instead of focusing on economic and class issues. Another clutched his pearls about what a dumb strategic move it was to dismiss most of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.” And at Reason, human dumpster fire Robby Soave — whose shtik seems to be retyping old Reed Irvine and Dinesh D’Souza screeds with his name on them — literally lays the blame for Trump at the feet of campus speech codes, trigger warnings and safe spaces. (No, if anything defeated Clinton it was stay-at-home Democratic voters disgusted by a Democratic Party that embraced way too many of the same neoliberal — not genuinely libertarian — economic policies favored by Reason.)

(...)

But the cultural Right’s sense of grievance is utter nonsense. For people who complain so much about the “politics of victimhood,” they play the victim card better than anybody else.

Long ago, as a child, I can remember hearing old folks complain that “this country’s been going to pot ever since all these people started screaming about their ‘rights.'” And that’s still the attitude of those who talk about “taking our country back.”

Whatever they think of marginalized people demanding their rights, they sure aren’t modest about the rights they claim for themselves. They think they have the right to decide what languages people speak, what religious garb they wear, who they marry, and what bathrooms they go to. And when they talk about PC as an assault on their freedom, what they’re referring to is their freedom to prohibit other people from doing things they disapprove of. You can’t even say “Happy Holidays” to them without them whining about a “War on Christmas.” For all their mockery of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” they’re the most emotionally fragile and easily offended people in existence.

They actually talk about “Thought Police,” and sidle up to other white males with “I guess we’re not allowed to say this any more, but…”

If you compare their complaints to the complaints of the marginalized people they criticize, they’re completely asymmetrical. Women in hijabs have to worry about being verbally and physically assaulted when they leave their homes. Unarmed black people have to worry about being shot in the back and having drop guns planted on their bodies, or being killed in “nickel rides” by sadistic cops. Gay and trans people have to worry about being stomped to death.

So if you think you’re living in a totalitarian nightmare because you have to worry about somebody giving you a dirty look for saying the n-word, or because you’re expected not to throw a tantrum when you see a woman in a hijab or two men kissing, I’ve got the world’s smallest violin. And if you think that’s a sufficient grievance to justify voting for a crypto-fascist just to “teach ’em a lesson,” then yes, you are deplorable.

It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the
choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.
This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to
any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special
purpose, and at the particular conjuncture.

It was equally desirable, that the immediate
election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities
adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to
deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and
inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of
persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will
be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to
such complicated investigations.

It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little
opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least
to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so
important an agency in the administration of the government as the
President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so
happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an
effectual security against this mischief. The choice of several,
to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to
convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than
the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of
the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to
assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached
and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments,
which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were
all to be convened at one time, in one place. (...)

All these advantages will happily combine in the plan devised by the
convention; which is, that the people of each State shall choose a
number of persons as electors, equal to the number of senators and
representatives of such State in the national government, who shall
assemble within the State, and vote for some fit person as President.
Their votes, thus given, are to be transmitted to the seat of the
national government, and the person who may happen to have a majority of
the whole number of votes will be the President. But as a majority of
the votes might not always happen to centre in one man, and as it might
be unsafe to permit less than a majority to be conclusive, it is
provided that, in such a contingency, the House of Representatives shall
select out of the candidates who shall have the five highest number of
votes, the man who in their opinion may be best qualified for the
office.

An extraordinary refinement this, on the plain simple business of
election; and of which the grand convention have certainly the honor of
being the first inventors; and that for an officer too, of so much
importance as a president – invested with legislative and executive
powers; who is to be commander in chief of the army, navy, militia,
etc.; grant reprieves and pardons; have a temporary negative on all
bills and resolves; convene and adjourn both houses of congress; be
supreme conservator of laws; commission all officers; make treaties; and
who is to continue four years, and is only removable on conviction of
treason or bribery, and triable only by the senate, who are to be his
own council, whose interest in every instance runs parallel with his
own, and who are neither the officers of the people, nor accountable to
them.

Is it then become necessary, that a free people should first resign
their right of suffrage into other hands besides their own, and then,
secondly, that they to whom they resign it should be compelled to choose
men, whose persons, characters, manners, or principles they know
nothing of? And, after all (excepting some such change as is not likely
to happen twice in the same century) to intrust Congress with the final
decision at last? Is it necessary, is it rational, that the sacred
rights of mankind should thus dwindle down to Electors of electors, and
those again electors of other electors? This seems to be degrading them
even below the prophetical curse denounced by the good old patriarch, on
the offspring of his degenerate son: “servant of servants”. . .

Again I would ask (considering how prone mankind are to engross power,
and then to abuse it) is it not probable, at least possible, that the
president who is to be vested with all this demiomnipotence – who is not
chosen by the community; and who consequently, as to them, is
irresponsible and independent-that he, I say, by a few artful and
dependent emissaries in Congress, may not only perpetuate his own
personal administration, but also make it hereditary?(...) Or, may not the senate, who are nearly in the same situation, with
respect to the people, from similar motives and by similar means, erect
themselves easily into an oligarchy, towards which they have already
attempted so large a stride? To one of which channels, or rather to a
confluence of both, we seem to be fast gliding away; and the moment we
arrive at it-farewell liberty. . . .

To conclude, I can think of but one source of right to government, or
any branch of it-and that is THE PEOPLE. They, and only they, have a
right to determine whether they will make laws, or execute them, or do
both in a collective body, or by a delegated authority. Delegation is a
positive actual investiture. Therefore if any people are subjected to an
authority which they have not thus actually chosen-even though they may
have tamely submitted to it-yet it is not their legitimate government.
They are wholly passive, and as far as they are so, are in a state of
slavery. Thank heaven we are not yet arrived at that state.

Following World War I, European Marxists faced a difficult question: why did the proletariat throughout Europe not rise in revolution and establish a new, Marxist order, as their ideology said it would? Two prominent Marxist thinkers, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukács in Hungary, came up with an answer: Western culture. Western culture so blinded the workers to their true, “class” interests that they could not act on them. (...)

This goal, of “saving” us by destroying the villain, Western civilization, was pursued through a multi-pronged attack. This was dubbed, by Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke, “the long march through the institutions.” Western civilization would be eradicated by gradually undermining the family, the local community, the church, the school, and perhaps most especially the university. (...)

By such means, the project of wrecking Western civilization has progressed pretty far. So why isn’t the proletariat casting off their chains and revolting? (...)

Asking a different question leads us to the answer, and that question is, “Why have corporations enthusiastically joined the cultural Marxists in their program of civilizational destruction?”

First off, do you know the old aphorism, “If you’re at a poker table and you don’t know who the mark is, you’re the mark”? If you answered, “Because corporations care about these issues,” well, you’re the mark. (...)

Those at the top of our giant corporations generally don’t care about these issues, at least not in any serious way: they care about becoming richer and richer and securing their positions against any potential threats.

The right answer as to why corporations have “joined” (“co-opted” is more like it) the cultural Marxists is that at some point, our corporate masters figured out that as the progress of wrecking Western culture progressed, people were becoming not revolutionary agents of change, but passive consumers of corporate swill and compliant workers penned in cubicles, nourished by fluorescent grow-lamps. (I am not claiming that corporate CEOs and boards are sophisticated social theorists who have explicitly traced this connection, just that at some point, they noticed, “Hey, this is working out pretty well for us!”) A key point in this learning process was likely when corporations found out that if they just offered “counter-cultural” rock stars enough money, those rock stars would happily would sell soda or credit cards. And such ads, offering packaged versions of sixties-era “individualism” and “rebellion,” were very effective at selling products, enabling marketing messages to slip right past the flower children’s wariness of big corporations.

Corporations found out that without a healthy culture, people are not natural Marxists but natural couch potatoes. With no extended family, no effective church, and no healthy local community to support their lives, people don’t form revolutionary cells: they buy a case of beer or renew their Xanax prescription and spend their non-working hours watching NFL games and the Lifetime network and various types of pornography. This dull, sedated existence is punctuated by certain “feast days,” such as Black Friday, when one can turn over lots of one’s money to corporations (...)

Even confirmed economic imperialists typically acknowledge that economic theory does not apply to the seriously mentally ill. Building on psychiatrist Thomas Szasz’s philosophy of mind, this article argues that most mental illnesses are best modeled as extreme preferences, not constraining diseases. This perspective sheds light not only on relatively easy cases like personality disorders, but also on the more extreme cases of delusions and hallucinations. Contrary to Szasz’s critics, empirical advances in brain science and behavioral genetics are largely orthogonal to his position. While involuntary psychiatric treatment might still be rationalized as a way to correct intra-family externalities, it is misleading to think about it as a benefit for the patient.